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ON HINDUISM ON HINDUISM ~ Wendy Doniger Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Wendy Doniger 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Doniger, Wendy. [Essays. Selections] On Hinduism / Wendy Doniger. pages cm ISBN 978-0-19-936007-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Hinduism. I. Title. BL1210.D66 2014 294.5--dc23 2013038952 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper CONTENTS Introduction: Foreword into the Past A Chronology of Hinduism ON BEING HINDU Hinduism by Any Other Name Are Hindus Monotheists or Polytheists? Three (or More) Forms of the Three (or More)-Fold Path in Hinduism The Concept of Heresy in Hinduism Eating Karma Medical and Mythical Constructions of the Body in Sanskrit Texts Death and Rebirth in Hinduism Forgetting and Re-awakening to Incarnation Assume the Position: The Fight over the Body of Yoga The Toleration of Intolerance in Hinduism The Politics of Hinduism Tomorrow GODS, HUMANS AND ANTI-GODS Saguna and Nirguna Images of the Deity You Can’t Get Here from There: The Logical Paradox of Hindu Creation Myths Together Apart: Changing Ethical Implications of Hindu Cosmologies God’s Body, or, the Lingam Made Flesh: Conflicts over the Representation of Shiva Sacrifice and Substitution: Ritual Mystification and Mythical Demystification in Hinduism The Scrapbook of Undeserved Salvation: The Kedara Khanda of the Skanda Purana WOMEN AND OTHER GENDERS Why Should a Brahmin Tell You Whom to Marry?: A Deconstruction of the Laws of Manu Saranyu/Samjna: The Sun and the Shadow The Clever Wife in Indian Mythology Rings of Rejection and Recognition in Ancient India The Third Nature: Gender Inversions in the Kamasutra Bisexuality and Transsexuality Among the Hindu Gods Transsexual Transformations of Subjectivity and Memory in Hindu Mythology KAMA AND OTHER SEDUCTIONS The Control of Addiction in Ancient India Reading the Kamasutra: It Isn’t All About Sex The Mythology of the Kamasutra From Kama to Karma: The Resurgence of Puritanism in Contemporary India HORSES AND OTHER ANIMALS The Ambivalence of Ahimsa Zoomorphism in Ancient India: Humans More Bestial than the Beasts The Mythology of Horses in India The Submarine Mare in the Mythology of Shiva Indra as the Stallion’s Wife Dogs as Dalits in Indian Literature Sacred Cows and Beefeaters ILLUSION AND REALITY IN THE HINDU EPICS Impermanence and Eternity in Hindu Epic, Art and Performance Shadows of the Ramayana Women in the Mahabharata The History of Ekalavya ON NOT BEING HINDU ‘I Have Scinde’: Orientalism and Guilt Doniger O’Flaherty on Doniger You Can’t Make an Omelette The Forest-dweller Appendix I: Limericks on Hinduism Appendix II: Essays on Hinduism by Wendy Doniger List of Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index INTRODUCTION FOREWORD INTO THE PAST ‘How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?’ —E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927), chapter 5. ‘If I had to live my life again, I’d make all the same mistakes, only sooner.’ —Tallulah Bankhead HOW I CAME TO STUDY HINDUISM y heart always sinks when a stranger at a dinner party or a conference M asks me, brightly, ‘How did you [ever] get interested in the study of India?’ as if this were some weird perversion that required an elaborate explanation. But perhaps the moment has finally come to answer this question properly, in the foreword to a book about India, and one of the world’s great religions, that spans my entire academic life. It all began when I was about twelve years old, and my mother gave me a copy of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. It changed my life. At a time when I was consumed by religious questions, Forster persuaded me (wrongly, I now know) that everyone in India was constantly thinking and talking about nothing but religion, and that they had the answers. I found a copy of Robert Hume’s translation of the Upanishads, and was stunned by their beauty and wisdom. My mother also gave me Rumer Godden’s The River and Mooltiki, and Aubrey Menen’s wicked satire on the Ramayana, and Kipling’s Just So Stories and Jungle Book and, later, Kim. She was an amateur Orientalist in her own way, and was crazy about Angkor Wat (which she pronounced, in the Viennese manner, Angkor Vat); she cherished her copy of the great four-volume work on the temples of Angkor published in 1930 by the École Française de l’Extrème Orient. All her life she wanted to visit those temples, and she finally did. When I went to live in India for a year, she came to visit me and went on by herself to see Angkor despite the rumbles of war (it was 1964), and when she was dying, thirty years later, she told me that that had been the high point of her whole life. That old French book remained a kind of icon to me throughout my youth; when my mother died, it came to me, and it still holds for me the mystery and glamour that it had then. I passed it on (together with my mother’s politics) to my son, Michael Lester O’Flaherty (born in 1971), who began his graduate study of the history of Southeast Asia at Cornell in 1995. And I finally visited Angkor Wat, too, just this past January of 2012. But I’m getting ahead of my story. Barely into my teens, I discovered that I loved the glorious excess of things Indian: I preferred Indian painting, with its infinite detail, to Renaissance paintings; I preferred Indian temples, with their rococo carvings, to the great cathedrals of Europe, let alone the sleek Bauhaus that was admired in my day. I rebelled against the moderation and restraint of what was called ‘good taste’—clothing of beige, mauve and basic black— and delighted in the reds and purples and oranges and yellows of Rajasthani silks and cottons. I liked Indian music, particularly the sarod, which moaned like a human voice as it slid from note to note, far better than Western music where every note had to fit into a rigid slot. My favourite food was Indian food, which I liked eating with my hand(s); I had always hated knives and forks. I watched Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955) more times than I can now remember; it was the most beautiful film I had ever seen. But most of all, I loved Hindu mythology, the stories of the gods; I particularly loved the way that the stories were told and retold, over and over, each time differently. I had been, from very early childhood, enchanted by stories about other worlds, fairies and gods, a fact that is corroborated by a large portrait of me that my uncle, Harvey Haines, painted (badly) when I was just five years old: I’m holding a fairy tale castle, Disney-turreted and covered with swirls of oil paint patterned like Florentine endpapers, and I’m reading a book that begins, ‘Once upon a time …’ In high school I continued to flee from what I had come to regard as the excessive reality of the real world by studying Latin and, in unofficial sessions with my devoted Latin teacher, Anita Lilenfeld (now Seligson), ancient Greek. She casually mentioned to me that Sanskrit, closely related to Greek and Latin, was the language of ancient India, which meant to me the language of A Passage to India (and, by extension, Angkor Wat). By then I was thoroughly hooked, and I chose to go to Radcliffe, rather than Swarthmore, largely because I could learn Sanskrit at Harvard. And so I began the study of Sanskrit as a seventeen-year-old freshman in 1958. Surely the long shadow of Angkor fell over me as I sat in the dusty little room at the top of Widener library, studying Sanskrit with Daniel H.H. Ingalls. He taught me not only Sanskrit but Indian literature, Indian history, Indian religion, and something else, harder to define, something about the pleasure of scholarship, the elegance of the written word, the luxury of the world of the mind. So I was trained as a Sanskritist. But I was not a real Sanskritist; real Sanskritists (Ingalls was not at all typical) are cold-blooded pedants interested only in verbs and nouns, and I was a hot-blooded ex-ballet dancer still interested in stories.